hjm fall 2010 complete text - westfield state university · eric jay dolin’s leviathan: the...

149

BOOK REVIEWS

Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641. By Michael P. Winship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. 246 pp. + 76 pp. notes, index. $29.95 (paperback).

A little more than a decade after the first Puritan pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts and founded the colony, a tremendous doctrinal crisis emerged within the Puritan community which resulted in congregations divided with dissension, ecclesiastical careers terminated or ruined, and able leaders exiled to other colonies or back to England. Michael Winship, in his book Making Heretics, aptly names this crisis “the Free Grace controversy” and meticulously details the events, personalities and doctrinal issues that led up to the trials and judgments of 1636-1638.

The appellation is appropriate because the argument was essentially about how much a sinner can continue to sin and still receive the free love and grace of God. On one side were those who embodied the classic Puritan stance that life must be lived in the strictest terms, in daily repentance and prayer and largely without joy or mirth. Those who championed this way of thinking felt compelled to discipline and police the behavior of their parishioners with heightened vigilance. Of Thomas Shepherd, Winship writes that he “felt impelled to act as God’s fist during the free grace controversy” (25). While the text is often tedious with detail, occasional metaphors like the fist of God render a lively reading. On the other side stood the “carnal gospelers,” centered on Ann Hutchinson, a lay woman, whose good deeds and calm assurance, especially among women and during childbirth, resulted in a large following. They believed in the charismatic revelation of God’s love and generally enjoyed life in less severe terms. There were abuses, however, and Winship gives us the adulterous story of Capt. John Underhill who “enjoyed [the cooper’s wife] three or four times a day” (155) knowing that he still had the absolute promise of God’s free grace and forgiveness.

Historical Journal of Massachusetts • Fall 2010150

In between the two factions stood the moderates of which Justice Winthrop (later Governor) was one. As the author introduces each key personality and the events of this crisis, he is meticulous with detail and citations from original documents. Winthrop, for example, had indicated that the Boston church believed that “those that bee in Christ are not under the Law, and commands of the word, as a rule of life” (153). The colonial spelling and wording transports the reader into the year 1636. In other places, however, Michael Winship interprets the characters or events with a surprising and vivid love of the contemporary vernacular. When a group of extreme protestors challenged Winthrop’s court, the author first quotes from the original document but then follows with “Winthrop replied, in so many words, make my day.” The echoes of Clint Eastwood interjected into this very scholarly text made my day as a reader. Such gems in the midst of fine textual analysis keep the reader enchanted.

In the end, Winship shows that, after much damage to congregations, private lives and careers, the crisis was resolved due to the frontier which surrounded the colony, offering many options to those who were scorned or dissatisfied. They could simply emigrate to another colony or back to England, which many did.

Not to be missed, however, is the obvious application to today’s society. The Boston church began with moderation, Winship writes, “but personalities took over” and the crisis was not the result of errors but of the fanatical pursuit of those errors by zealous personalities, each one fanning the flames for personal or political reasons, consciously or subconsciously (64). In a calmer season, many of the points that so enraged some might not have been very controversial at all (159). The moderates themselves got caught up in the verbiage, making nearly everyone a heretic to some degree. Winship’s accomplishment should not be overlooked, for his book underscores the valid premise that history has lessons to teach, if only we would learn them.

Martha M. Sienkiewicz is an adjunct English professor at Westfield State University.

151BOOK REVIEWS

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. By Eric Jay Dolin. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 479 pages. $18.45 (hardcover).

In 1635 Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony recorded in his journal that some of the colony’s residents had located a whale on Cape Cod and processed it for whale oil. Thus the first known account of drift whaling, the use of creatures cast by nature upon the shore, by English colonists in North America entered into the historical record. In the roughly three centuries that followed, those interested in exploiting the whale looked progressively farther afield for the bounty of the seas. The small boats used by early shore whalers gradually gave way to ocean-going vessels from places like Nantucket and New Bedford. On board these ships men sailed around the world and back again in search of the profits to be made on the sale of products taken from whales: oil, baleen, spermaceti, and ambergris.

Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America offers an enjoyable and highly readable account of the industry’s advent, maturation, apex in the “golden age of whaling,” and ultimate decline. At its heart, Leviathan is a work of historical synthesis offering relatively little information or interpretation that is truly new. Readers well versed in the history of American whaling will observe the clear influence of a number of the field’s major texts on Dolin’s work, including quite prominently Alexander Starbuck’s classic History of the American Whale Fishery in the text’s earliest pages.

Unfortunately, within the text there are a number of questionable, imprecise and ambiguous passages, two examples of which will suffice. The shore whaling industry, readers are told, demanded so much labor that “Capt. John Thacher, in 1694, when he was looking for recruits on Cape Cod to fight the French and Indian War,” was unable to find sufficient numbers of men for soldiers (53). Though King William’s War, the conflict to which Dolin refers, was part of the series of French and Indian Wars waged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it would be more appropriate to label it thusly, given the convention of labeling the portion of the Seven Years’ War fought in North America as the French and Indian War. Similarly, Dolin notes that whaling voyages offered employment


“to a growing number of impoverished men, both Native Americans and immigrants, who began crowding the city” during whaling’s golden age (274). The context of the passage appears to indicate that Native Americans here refer to native born peoples of European extraction, though this is by no means clear given that the same language is often and exclusively used elsewhere in the work to refer to American Indians.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Leviathan is still a valuable book, particularly for those new to the subject matter and those interested in the histories of Massachusetts. Dolin does well to explain the state’s dominance of the American whale fishery across its long history. Likewise, the author has done an excellent job of making readily understandable the complicated and fascinating story of the transatlantic struggle that pitted the governments of France and England and the whaling fleets that they supported against Bay State merchants and ship captains.

Charles H. Williams is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Emory University.

Slavery in the Age of Reason – Archaeology at a New England Farm. By Alexandra A Chan. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 284 pages. $48.00 (hardcover).

It is one of great puzzles of New England’s historiography: why the collective scholarship of many generations of fine scholars has created a literature on colonial African slavery which remains, in the twenty-first century, still so desperately thin?

It was in 1638 after all, just eight years after the arrival of the Arbella, that New England’s first black slaves disembarked in Boston, and it was Massachusetts that was the first British North American colony to legally sanction human bondage. While the number of slaves was low by the standard of the middle colonies, let alone the South or the Caribbean, it was still considerable. A 1754 census recorded 2,700 slaves spread across Massachusetts, of whom nearly one thousand resided in Boston, representing one in fifteen of the adult population.

153BOOK REVIEWS

And yet, histories of eighteenth-century Boston, home to Crispus Attucks and Phyllis Wheatley, a lynchpin of the triangular trade, remain unexpectedly and almost uniformly quiet on the experience of its African-American population. In part, the silence reflects the difficulty of reconstituting the lives of men, women and children whose very status was designed to constrain human agency and identity, but that alone is an insufficient explanation. The absence reflects, perhaps more, the questions that historians have chosen to ask of their sources, for, as Alexandra Chan demonstrates in her unique and very welcome contribution to our collective knowledge, in colonial newspapers, legislation, court records, private correspondence and memoirs, the subject of black slavery was in constant discourse.

In a beautifully written work of considerable ambition, intense curiosity and admirable inter-disciplinarity, Chan travels a lonely path first cleared by Lorenzo Greene, Robert Twombly and William Pierson, and in doing so contributes a significant addition to the literature on slavery in pre-revolutionary New England. Chan’s subject is the Massachusetts estate of Isaac Royall (1677-1739) and his eponymous son (1719-81), full members of the Anglo-American New England elite, occupying positions of political, economic, social and cultural power in the generation before Independence. The Royall family arrived in New England from an Antigua sugar plantation abandoned amid rebellion plots that cost the lives of 77 slaves, burnt at the stake, including their own slave driver, Hector. They purchased a 500-acre Medford estate in 1737, which was so rapidly developed it was valued at £40,000 in 1739, making Isaac Royall Sr, one of New England’s wealthiest men. Over the next thirty-five years, the Royalls became a fixture of the colonial gentry and the largest slave-owning family in Massachusetts.

Chan’s work is primarily one of historical archaeology and draws heavily on 1999-2001 excavations, which she led, of sections of the remaining acre of land on which the Royall house, and its slave quarters, still stands. Self-consciously an historical archaeologist who “spends as much time in the archives as the dirt,” Chan undertakes a thorough examination of historical records, as well as drawing heavily on insights from ethnography and cultural studies.

Positioning the Royalls as members of a community increasingly defined by shared patterns of distinctive consumption and display, Chan looks to the archaeological record to cast fresh light on the visual representations of elite authority, encapsulated in ceramics, glassware and other material culture, which the Royall family assiduously fostered. Chan’s empathy


and interest, however, lies outside the Royalls’ parlour. Her prime interest is in the reconstruction of the slave experience of life on the estate. Drawing on a wide range of historical resources and secondary studies of eighteenth-century slave communities, Chan works through a series of recognizable themes in reconstructing slave life: family and culture, master-slave relationships, work and play, assimilation and resistance. In doing so, Chan adds a new record of archaeological material culture and close reading of historical record to a wide review of relevant literature.

Through a series of tantalising artifacts discovered near the slave quarters — an arrowhead amulet, a pestle, abundant tobacco pipes, repaired crockery, a single stone bead hollowed through by human hands, a clutch of marbles, thimble, pins and scissors and extensive evidence of berry picking — Chan recovers a material culture that brings life and insight to her account of slave existence. Drawing on West African ethnographies, she finds parallel artefacts to the tiny amulet, just five centimetres in diameter, and locates the object within a realm of African spirituality, contributing a new perspective to debates over African cultural continuity and assimilation in the new world.

Considering the family unit, Chan looks to naming records and Royall account books to reconstruct the distorted contours of slave family life, and finds evidence of a community struggling to maintain kinship ties in the most difficult of circumstances. Few slaves spent more than ten years on the Medford estate and, typical of New England’s slave communities, the population, which numbered 34 in 1754, was overwhelmingly male. It was unusual, outside of Boston, to have a large concentration of African-Americans. Across New England, slaves were found scattered through townships, in small numbers, commonly fewer than ten, with adult men outnumbering adult women by a margin of two to one. In such inhospitable conditions, characterized by curfews and anti-miscegenation laws, colonial slaves refused to be wholly disempowered and struggled successfully to nurture and protect their own identities and family ties.

In recounting the story of the Royalls and their slaves, people who led vastly different lives, occupying opposite ends of the social spectrum, Chan’s telling eye for detail adds considerable color and light. Our understanding of the social meanings of appearance and consumption in eighteenth century New England is aided by Chan’s demonstration that for the same price, £14, Isaac Royall, Sr. paid for his wig in 1737, a farmer would have been able to purchase two heifers, a cart horse, a mare and a colt or six pigs. Equally, when the same man paid £12 for one-quarter pound of cocoa in the same year, this was expenditure which could have

155BOOK REVIEWS

paid the day wages of 24 labourers or bought half a mahogany desk. Chan illustrates the hostility shown by urban slave owners to slave motherhood through a poignant selection of an advertisement in the 1739 Boston Evening Post: “Negro child, a few days old, to be given away.”

Alexandra Chan is commendably honest in giving voice to her own opinions and views. Her sympathies are clear and spoken without embarrassment. In doing so and in producing a work of real historical significance, she rises to the challenge of Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class represents one of the founding texts of modern social history. To Thompson, it was a duty of the discipline to help the marginalized and oppressed to have their voices heard against ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. Chan has responded to that challenge and done so admirably.

Anthony Mann, Ph.D., is the director of Research and Policy at the UK’s Education and Employer Taskforce in Brighton.

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America. By Hilary J. Moss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 296 pages. $37.50 (hardcover).

Schooling Citizens opens with a brief account of the terrible violence that erupted in Canaan, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1835 when a mob of angry white residents attacked African American students and destroyed the building that housed their school. What happened in Canaan, unfortunately, happened in various locations throughout the North during the antebellum era. In this compelling study, historian Hilary J. Moss seeks to understand what spurred white residents to oppose African American education and what inspired African Americans to keep fighting for an education (3). Because she operates on the premise that white opposition to African American education “was not a foregone conclusion,” Moss is able to provide a nuanced and careful


analysis of public schooling in antebellum America with respect to issues of race, citizenship and region (10).

Building on the work of educational historians like Lawrence Cremin and Carl Kaestle, Moss asks why opposition to African American education coincided with the emergence of public schooling. She finds that the common school movement emerged during the nineteenth century with the stated aim of providing white children with a shared educational background that would “teach them to become Americans” (4). With this particular emphasis on performing citizenship and national identity, nineteenth century school reformers unwittingly promoted the exclusion of African Americans from public schooling since African Americans were noncitizens. Indeed the common school movement “reinforced white efforts to withhold civil rights from African Americans” (13). Yet many African American activists and educators understood this relationship between schooling and citizenship, and they fought for educational equity while also trying to foil attempts by some whites to “expel black people from the polity” (13). Indeed the emergence of both the common school movement and white opposition to African American education was, Moss claims, no coincidence.

To substantiate her argument, Moss examines three cities in antebellum America: New Haven, Baltimore and Boston. Even though she discusses each locality independently, her use of a variety of archival documentation allows her to give a multifaceted perspective on African American education. For instance, whites in New Haven generally seemed to tolerate African American education in the early nineteenth century, but as the colonization movement waned and the abolition movement grew and became more radical in the 1830’s, most whites began to oppose African American education quite vigorously. This shift can be seen in the fight over the proposed establishment of a manual labor college for African American men in New Haven. Moss relies on newspaper articles, census records and city directories, among other sources, to demonstrate that the objections raised by New Haven residents about the manual labor college actually betrayed their declining power “over African Americans’ socioeconomic mobility” (61-2). Indeed the very idea of an educated African American community that pursued education to advance their own civil rights threatened many whites.

Some readers might expect that white opposition in Baltimore, Maryland was far more pervasive than in New Haven, Connecticut because Maryland was a slaveholding state. In fact, the contrary is true. Moss finds that white resistance to African American education did

157BOOK REVIEWS

not really materialize in Baltimore for a number of reasons, not least of which was “white dependence on free black labor, within the context of slavery, which fostered a climate conducive to African American literacy” (69). Here Moss combs through apprenticeship contracts, help-wanted advertisements and census records to illustrate her larger point about Baltimore as an enclave for African American educational opportunity in the South, which stands in contrast to the education inequity as seen in New Haven and the educational divide over the issue of segregation in Boston.

The third and final section of Schooling Citizens focuses on Boston, Massachusetts, which is arguably the most captivating case study in this book. Moss analyzes the efforts of the African American community to obtain an education while also contextualizing their experiences. First, she studies the geography of the Beacon Hill area to shed light on why white residents there petitioned to block the construction of a new school for African American children. Her work here is fascinating for what it says about whiteness, space and African American endurance.

Second, Moss describes how, even after various frustrating setbacks, many African Americans remained committed to the campaign for school desegregation in cities like Nantucket, Salem and Boston. For instance, while the ruling in the Roberts v. Boston case was, to be sure, a blow to integrationists, African Americans like William J. Watkins and Benjamin Roberts continued to fight to desegregate Boston public schools. However, Moss complicates our understanding of what happened in Boston by offering a particularly astute reading of the meaning behind the tarring and feathering of Thomas Paul Smith, an African American critic of school desegregation. Proponents of school integration were angry with Smith speaking out against integration, so they attacked him. In Moss’s view, what happened to Smith was indicative of the larger struggle for African American educational opportunity that, at times, divided the African American community.

A systematic study on African American education in antebellum America was long overdue, and Hilary J. Moss’ well-researched and well-written book is a valuable contribution to the field of American educational history and African American history. Moreover, by factoring race into the discussion on educational opportunity, Moss forces her readers to realize that education was not the great equalizer in antebellum America. Schooling Citizens also reminds us that this story of the struggle for African American education is not finished; there is more work to be done to bring these histories into full view.


Kabria Baumgartner is a doctoral candidate in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 311 pages. $23.95 (paperback).

Julie Roy Jeffrey provides a broad

overview of white and black women’s roles in the abolition movement from the emergence of immediatism in the 1830s through the Civil War. Before this book appeared, most historians of abolitionism concentrated on the ideas and actions of men in the movement, and those who did investigate the role of women typically focused on those antislavery activists who also became involved in women’s rights. This work redirects the historiography of American abolition in two ways. First, it persuasively argues that while prominent men have received the lion’s share of attention, ordinary women in a variety of places served as the backbone of the movement, helping to keep many local societies going even as the movement as a whole appeared to lose momentum in the 1840’s. Second, it reminds historians that while abolitionism did help to launch a women’s rights movement, the work women did as abolitionists needs to be understood on its own terms.

In order to make her case for the prominence of women in the movement, Jeffrey painstakingly recaptures the nature of women’s contributions. One constant challenge facing abolitionists was fundraising, and she highlights the various ways that women worked to meet this need. One method, which had previously received little attention from historians, was the antislavery fair, which became a central activity of female abolitionists by the 1840’s. Held in big cities as well as smaller towns, these fairs not only offered consumer goods made in Europe but also a variety of locally-made goods

159BOOK REVIEWS

sewn or crafted by women themselves, from quilts and hats to shirts and pocketbooks. In addition to creating goods, women also booked the halls, generated publicity, and priced and sold the items. The fairs were often held on holidays and could draw large numbers of customers, who would encounter anti-slavery banners as they perused the goods available for purchase. In addition to raising money, women played a primary role in petition campaigns.

While these campaigns were most active in the 1830’s, they continued to take place through the antebellum period and actually became more prominent again during the Civil War itself. Women also did the work of creating antislavery propaganda as well as sponsoring antislavery lectures. Taken together, women engaged in much of the day-to-day work needed to keep local antislavery societies functioning. Jeffrey suggests that the modest yet concrete nature of this work helped make women more likely than men to maintain their involvement: “That women had something tangible in which to root their loyalties may be one reason that women, not men, constituted the great silent army of abolitionism. Continuing and often humble labors bound women together and provided milestones on the way to a distant goal” (6).

In addition to highlighting the underappreciated role of women in the movement, Jeffrey also explains what becoming an abolitionist meant to those women who joined. Most of the women she encounters had a variety of commitments and responsibilities, yet they labored to carve out the time to take part in a movement they found important. She also argues that female abolitionism sheds light on the debate over the meaning of public and private in middle-class life. Many women who embraced abolitionism did so because they accepted a gendered view of the world and women’s unique religious and moral responsibilities. She argues that most historians have tried to categorize female abolitionists as either conservative or radical, depending on their stance concerning women’s rights. But Jeffrey argues that “moral commitment demanded public expressions.” (7). In other words, abolitionist women often confronted figures of authority, either in their neighborhoods or at their churches, even though very few went on to also embrace the women’s rights movement.

For those interested in the history of Massachusetts, Jeffrey’s work provides a wealth of insights into a variety of “ordinary” women in towns and cities such as Hingham, Andover, Salem and Fitchburg. Jeffrey’s wide-ranging research into dozens of private collections provides a window onto the ideas and actions of a great variety of Massachusetts women, and some of the most illuminating insights come from the brief biographical


sketches that Jeffrey is able to craft. For example, her examination of Frances Drake’s work on behalf of the Leominster Female Anti-Slavery Society helps the reader understand something about the texture of this woman’s life and the role that the abolition movement played in it. While Jeffrey’s work has certainly not been the last word on female abolitionists, it has established itself as one of the first places to begin.

Sean Condon teaches history at Merrimack College.

Quincy’s Market: A Boston Landmark. By John Quincy, Jr. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. 283 pages. $29.95.

Visitors to Faneuil Hall today would be hard pressed to see the history underneath the veneer of the “tourist trap” it has become. It is easy to wander through the stalls and buildings and see only the open-air mall that it appears to be. There are nods to its past aplenty: cobblestones, living history reenactors, cramped stalls. The people standing in line at Pizzeria Regina have no idea that they are standing where pigs were once slaughtered, or the cart vendors set up where rickety stalls stood for decades.

This book is a reminder of Boston’s past. It is also a story about how close Boston came to losing yet another of its landmarks. John Qunicy, Jr. weaves a detailed and entertaining narrative, covering the history of Faneuil Hall from its murky origins as an open market in colonial times, through its dramatic expansion in the 1820s under Mayor Josiah Quincy (the author’s direct ancestor), to the renovation efforts of the 1960s and 70s that saved it from the wrecking ball.

It would be easy to dismiss Quincy’s book based on appearance, just as it would be to dismiss Quincy Market for its cover as well. On the surface, Quincy’s Market looks like a coffee table book. It is written by a descendant of the man who gave the market its name. Quincy Market resembles a mall, with large chains dominating the retail space. Dismissing either of them would be a mistake.

161BOOK REVIEWS

Quincy’s book is meticulously researched, incorporating a large number of unpublished primary sources. Numerous illustrations and photographs are sprinkled throughout the text, providing visual clues to help the reader understand what the market actually looked like over time. Despite the high level of scholarship, the book is very readable, making it more appealing to the general public. While the format makes for handsome presentation, one cannot help but wonder why such a good book of history was packaged this way. As previously noted, it looks like a decorative coffee table collection, but it most definitely is not. Professional historians, land and building preservations, and interested amateurs would all find Quincy’s Market interesting and informative, if they bothered to look past the facade. Like its subject, there is more to this book than it would appear.

Perhaps this is the only way a book about Quincy Market could be presented. Faneuil Hall has many lessons and stories to tell. One just has to look past appearances to find them.

Micah Schneider is a Master’s candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Money, Morals, and Politics: Massachusetts in the Age of the Boston Associates. By William F. Hartford. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001. 286 pp. + xiv. $55.00 (paperback).

William Hartford’s Money, Morals, and Politics is a well-researched study of politics in the Bay State between 1800 and 1861. During these years, Hartford argues, an elite group of Boston merchants and industrialists, the so-called Boston Associates, dominated the state’s economy through control of key commercial, industrial, and financial institutions and dominated state politics through an alliance of middling interests, newspaper publishers, select labor leaders and conservative state politicians.

Drawing on a tradition of deferential politics, the Boston Associates and their political allies persuaded a majority of Massachusetts voters that they were the best guardians of the state’s


communal interests. The Federalist Party served the political interests of the Associates until it collapsed in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention. The Whig Party, which evolved in response to the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, continued to serve economic elites in Massachusetts and elsewhere until it was torn apart by the conflict over abolition and slavery. Throughout the period under study, the spokespersons for the Boston elites, primarily conservative newspaper publishers and editors, articulated an ideology of common interests: what was good for the merchants and industrialists of Boston was good for the farmers, town merchants, and social leaders.

This ideology was challenged on several occasions, notably during the Jefferson Administration’s embargo of European goods in the first decade of the nineteenth century and again during the increasing vehement debates over the moral, economic and political consequences of slavery in the 1850’s. In the first instance, the Boston Associates were able to retain their authority by appealing to regional loyalties. On the increasingly controversial issue of slavery, however, the close economic and political ties between textile mill owners and cotton planters undermined the moral authority of the Associates. The Massachusetts Whig leaders followed the national party in placing national unity over regional interests, allowing the rising Republican Party to charge that the Associates and their Whig allies were apologists for the heinous practice of slavery.

For many, this is a familiar story. Hartford’s primary contribution is an intricate study of the rhetorical techniques and ideologies of the state’s opinion leaders. Hartford makes extensive use of newspaper editorials, news coverage, and the correspondence of political leaders and their commercial allies. These sources allow him to illustrate the myriad connections between Massachusetts’ political and economic leaders. It also documents the development of their shared belief that only the commercial and social leaders of the state had the moral standing to serve as its political leadership.

According to Hartford, it was the loss of this moral standing that precipitated the collapse of the Whig Party in Massachusetts. This approach, however, privileges the opinion of the social and political elites and fails to adequately demonstrate if the common voters of Massachusetts shared the ideological views of their leaders. A close analysis of election returns may have provided support for Hartford’s assertions, but he makes no such study. As a consequence, the book lacks the analytic complexity exhibited in other studies of the Whigs, such as Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1984) or Michael Holt’s

163BOOK REVIEWS

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999). Hartford’s work, then, provides a plausible explanation for the Boston Associates’ political and economic control of Massachusetts, but it does not provide sufficient evidence to support his conclusions.

Thomas Slopnick is an adjunct professor in the Social Science and Hospitality Department at Manchester Community College.

Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England. By Brian G. Greenfield. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. 256 pages. $26.95 (paperback).

What is an antique, and what gives antiques value? Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive study of antiques and antiquing, this book uses case studies of various aspects of the history of the antique business in the twentieth century to address these questions. Specifically, it explores the ways in which antiques came to be redefined and revalued in the first decades of the century, strongly illustrating that what seems immutable can in fact be quite fluid and much newer than once thought. Additionally, the study takes the story through the end of the era of aesthetic rather than historical values and the beginning of another definition in the 1960’s, a new historical perspective that means perhaps the end of antiquing as a pastime in the twenty-first century.

The twentieth century antique was prized for its aesthetic qualities, as a work of art like an old master or a prized sculpture. This was not always the case. When Americans became interested in old things in the late nineteenth century they found greater merit in those things that had a tie to specific Americans: the rocking chair in which Lincoln was shot, for instance, or any of the innumerable beds in which George Washington slept. Age and association made an object a link between the past and the present. Additional value came with a traceable history. When art value


became paramount, this association faded until it could sometimes be a detriment but commonly was an irrelevancy.

Chapter-long case studies include one that introduces the development of the trade, the pursuit of rare items in the countryside by specialists taking advantage of the “rubes,” as this was a middle-class pursuit. Another chapter documents the influence of Jewish used furniture dealers who evolved into antique dealers and restorers. Several chapters deal with the attempts to create an antique past in museums of various sorts. Old Deerfield is a fascinating study in the way that a town that held onto its past was swept aside by the reinvention of its past as representing an era rather than the specific town. Additionally, the Smithsonian gets a good treatment as a storehouse of old “cheap” things and a key to the shift away from representations of the rare and expensive of the past in favor of the common, a transition from the house museums to the modern material culture movement.

All of these changes take place in New England. Even English or Southern antiques had value as they primarily showed ties to New England or represented examples of New England styles. Yankee dealers bought them elsewhere and brought them to New England for resale as representative New England antiques. Only in the 1960s did museums and collectors acknowledge that there were other regions with other pasts and other collectibles, and even at the onset of the twenty-first century the history recreated most often is that of New England with at least acknowledgement of other regions, but nothing close to parity.

The author ends with expressions of concern that the new eBay generation is interested in collecting, but not particularly in collecting antiques. Collectibles can be novelties or “gimcracks” with associations to the collector’s past, such as 1950s lunch boxes or a particular type of mass-produced toy, but little in the way of aesthetic or historical value. Price is more important, as shown by the popular antique assessment program on public television. Even the old New England Jewish firms are feeling the pressure as new generations inherit businesses they have no interest in and shut them down.

The past is not immutable. As this well-researched and compellingly written work illustrates, the past is gone, and what remains is a creation of the present, a past that will give way to another.

John Barnhill is a retired civil servant and independent scholar who writes history in Houston, Texas.

165BOOK REVIEWS

A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry. By Beth English. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2006. 236 pages. $39.95 (hardcover).

The globalization of industry is not a new phenomenon. In A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, Beth English looks at New England textile manufacturers’ shift to the South from 1880 through the 1920s. During this crucial period, differences between the northern and southern branches’ wages, hours, and labor organization contributed to the industry’s ultimate decline between the 1920’s and 1960’s. Her analysis focuses specifically on the Dwight Manufacturing Company, a textile producer that originated in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and was one of the first New England textile companies to open a southern branch factory. English’s case study serves as an example of why many northern textile manufacturers relocated to the South and offers lessons that companies can glean from such capital mobility.

During the early nineteenth century, textile manufacturing drove New England’s industrialization and, by 1820, entrepreneurs such as Springfield merchant Jonathan Dwight Sr. had built factories along the Chicopee River. Industrial development continued to grow but was curtailed during the Civil War due to a lack of shipments of southern cotton. Although the Dwight Company returned to full production after the war, expansion to the South loomed on the horizon. The post-war South needed to rebuild its economy, as it could no longer depend on the plantation system and slave labor, and English explains that the logical answer to the South’s dilemma was industrialization. However, the task that remained was how to attract investors, especially Northern ones, to the region. Southern industrial boosters advertised the “cheap, docile, and native” (15) labor force that was available in the Southern Piedmont.

This was particularly alluring to the Dwight Company’s management, which was continually clashing with operatives. In April 1874, a five-week strike by the mulespinners after management refused to restore previously cut wages shut down two of the Dwight Company’s seven production buildings. Following the walkout, management worked hard to prevent


workers from organizing and staging protests. Such clashes, coupled with increasingly restrictive labor legislation, reinforced the image of the South as “the land of low wages, laissez-faire, and high profits,” (39) that offered a way to escape the limitations of the North and set up business in a region where state and local governments’ policies were more agreeable to the manufacturers. The Dwight Company seized its opportunity in 1896 and opened its Alabama branch.

While both the northern and southern branches operated simultaneously, the South’s lack of limitations on working hours and the low wages paid to Alabama operatives gave the southern branch the edge over the northern branch. As a result, the Alabama City mill consistently reported profits, while the Chicopee mill operated in the red. Production and profits peaked again during World War I, but the industry fell into a depression after the war ended as the demand for cotton goods declined. The Dwight Company ceased production in its Chicopee mill in 1928 as the industry depression gave way to the Great Depression. Closures of New England textile mills left nearly forty percent of the region’s 280,000 textile operatives out of work by the winter of 1931. For those who still had jobs, work was unsteady and sporadic. Closures and relocations to the South made New England mill towns such as Chicopee “sad, sad places” (129).

English explains that although unions were quite active in the North, they were never able to gain a secure foothold in the South. She argues that northern operatives saw their southern counterparts as competition and blamed them for wage and hours cuts. Thus, the workers from both regions were never able to create a united front to equalize conditions. Though this contributed to the demise of the Dwight Company’s Chicopee mill, it serves as a lesson for twenty-first century companies that move their production to foreign countries. English states that such relocation emphasizes the need for labor organizations “to view workers in developing nations not as competitors per se but as coworkers with whom they have a shared cause,” (181) something northern and southern mill workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries failed to do.

The missing element in English’s analysis is the voices of the individual mill workers. While she admits that these voices are a casualty of the approach she chooses to take, their inclusion would have been most valuable in chapters four and five. In the struggle over legislation that limited child labor, English does a nice job of giving the corporate side of the story, but readers are left to wonder the true feelings of the families who relied on their children’s wages to survive. The same can be said for the workers who suffered cutbacks in wages and hours, as the only way to

167BOOK REVIEWS

gauge their feelings is through their participation in unions. Readers are left to wonder about the workers who did not whole-heartedly agree with unionization. Unfortunately, their thoughts and opinions are overlooked and instead workers are treated as a monolithic group.

In spite of this omission, English’s corporate-centered approach allows her to effectively show the balancing act that the manufacturers undertook to keep their mills afloat and the reasons why they deemed unions to be so counterproductive. Her book is a tremendous asset to the historiography of the New England textile industry and the industry at large.

Michelle L. George is a graduate student in modern European and gender history at Villanova University

Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. By Aviva Chomsky. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 416 pages. $23.95 (paperback).

The guiding principle of Aviva Chomsky’s Linked Labor Histories is that “labor history is at the heart of understanding globalization” (4). A cynic might be forgiven for reading this statement by the author, who teaches labor history as well as Latin American studies at Salem State College, and writing off the rest of the work as a case of special pleading for one’s own academic discipline. However, it soon becomes clear that this perspective forms the basis of an illuminating study, one steeped in the history of working people’s struggles for social justice amidst the trials of deindustrialization, poverty, and repression.

To study a pair of regions with intersecting labor histories, Chomsky could not have chosen better in selecting Massachusetts and Colombia. Other historians, most notably Norman Ware, have looked to the nineteenth and early twentieth century labor struggles on the North Shore and found fertile terrain for writing and research. Chomsky favors the Bay State for its early experiences with globalization, coming in the form of capital flight to places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In


a pattern that she sees repeated throughout the labor histories of both Colombia and Massachusetts, owners and managers at the Hopedale-based Draper Loom Company — in its day the largest in the world — regularly used the threat of plant closure and capital flight as a means to discourage labor activism.

In Colombia, Chomsky finds what she calls the “flip side of globalization.” While her chapters on Massachusetts relate the baleful but by now familiar story of deindustrialization and capital flight, Colombia illustrates the opposite: “the attempt to create a neoliberal paradise to attract capital” (182). The Northern Urubá banana export region forms the focus of these chapters, and the “neoliberal paradise” cited above, consisting of a puny public sector presence coupled with a ready supply of cheap labor, has proven to be most attractive to American firms like Chiquita (formerly the Boston-based United Fruit Company). The fact that Chiquita pled guilty to making payments in 2003 to right-wing militias in Urubá demonstrates the sometimes violent measures taken to shore up American investment in South America. Indeed, Chomsky points to the complicity of multinational corporations in funding terrorism to support her argument that “[v]iolence and repression are an integral part of the economic model of globalization, built into its very structures” (188).

Perhaps no group in Colombia is better equipped to testify to the truth of that statement than trade unionists. Nearly 3,000 Colombian union leaders and activists have been assassinated in the past ten years. These crimes are rarely prosecuted by the government of President Álvaro Uribe. As Jorge Enrique Robledo, a left-wing Colombian legislator, recently put it: “in Colombia it’s easier to form a group of bank robbers than it is to form a labor union.” Yet for all the resistance faced by unionists in Colombia, Chomsky counts some small victories. In the past ten years, unions have finally gained ground, against great odds, in Urubá. However, one might have to consider this a Pyrrhic victory, for by the time capital had acceded to labor’s demands, conciliatory unions were at the helm, the more radical organizers having been murdered or forced into exile.

The struggles of Colombian union activists may recall historical links to the mills of Massachusetts. One inspiring story which Chomsky shares in this book is that of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company strike of 1933. Carried out in the midst of the Great Depression, the strikers in Salem could also declare victory in the end thanks to the efforts of the communist National Textile Workers Union and its national secretary, Anne “the Red Flame” Burlak.

169BOOK REVIEWS

The biggest challenge in putting together a volume of this kind must lie in keeping the various narrative strands intact. Chomsky largely succeeds in this endeavor and she is clear about the patterns which emerge from her study of Colombia and Massachusetts. That said, there are some weaknesses. The capsule biographies which appear at the end of each chapter feel superimposed, as though they might have been requested at the last minute by an editor in order to improve the book’s cachet among general-interest readers. If so, that tactic was not very successful, for the work remains dense enough to turn off the non-specialist. Nevertheless, Linked Labor Histories, which won the Best Book Award from the New England Council on Latin American Studies in 2009, deserves careful reading for the force of its arguments and the novelty of its approach.

Seth Kershner is a M.S. Candidate in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925. By Melissa R. Klapper. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. 219 pages. $27.50 (hardcover).

As a group that has been largely ignored

by historical literature, Melissa R. Klapper has given immigrant children the chance to finally speak in Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925. These children, whose lives were predominantly shaped by immigration and adaptation to the United States, were part of the turn-of-the-century mass migration when nearly twenty-five million people emigrated from Mexico, Japan, Canada, and southern and eastern Europe to settle in urban areas throughout America. Their story is one of straddling two worlds: their Old World’s ethnic heritage and the New World’s promise of opportunity, and the challenges posed by both.


Klapper takes a “life-cycle approach” to study how immigrant children balanced these competing worlds from childhood through adolescence. While there was no single “immigrant experience,” she argues that there were definite shared commonalities, including a desire for economic opportunity and the effects that Americanization had on families and ethnic traditions. Immigrant children experienced the strongest push to assimilate in the public school system, which worked to teach them how to “act, speak, think, and live as Americans” (47). Although immigrant parents wanted better lives for their children and saw education as a means to achieving this end, they feared that Americanization efforts would destroy their children’s ethnic ties.

In response, these parents worked to reinforce traditions by sending their children to language schools and emphasizing the celebration of ethnic holidays and family events. While these attempts proved successful with younger children, adolescents were more willing to turn their backs on their heritage in favor of American culture. Klapper explains that even though immigrant parents did not necessarily approve of this, they understood that this acculturation would ultimately contribute to their ethnic communities’ success in America.

The need for family income sometimes forced immigrant children to forgo their education in favor of wage labor, as family survival took precedence. To illustrate the importance of children’s wages, Klapper refers to the example of Massachusetts lawmakers’ attempt to ensure that the children working in Lowell’s mills put education before work. State legislators required that all children between fourteen and eighteen years of age show proof of school attendance, but these efforts were in vain as families found ways to circumvent the law and allow their children to continue to work full-time. However, during the Great Depression, child labor declined as adults took jobs previously held by children to support their families. Immigrant children attended school instead of working and adolescents, who previously chose work over education, enrolled in high schools in record numbers.

Klapper rounds out her study with a look at the effect that the National Origins Act of 1924 had on immigrant children. Post-World War I xenophobia was rampant and native-born Americans regarded immigrants with suspicion, regardless of these non-natives’ loyalty to America during the war. Quotas on immigration impacted ethnic communities and institutions as their links with the Old World weakened. Fearing reprisal for holding on to their traditional cultural practices, Klapper explains, rapid acculturation was the safest and best path, as “immigrants who had

171BOOK REVIEWS

been caught between two worlds during their own childhood now cast their lots on the side of Americanization” (169).

Although immigrant children did not make up the majority of the people who came to America searching for a better life, their experiences are certainly significant. Klapper incorporates sources such as the memoirs, diaries, oral histories, and periodicals relating to children from a broad range of ethnic groups which settled in areas such as New England, New York, the Midwest, and California. Through their own words, she effectively shows how they navigated “the twin shoals of cultural retention and cultural adaptation” (179). Her research remains pertinent, as immigrant children today still face similar challenges and continue to create a unique world that is different from that of their parents and their native-born peers.

Michelle L. George is a graduate student in modern European and gender history at Villanova University.

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. By Kirstin Downey. New York: Doubleday, 2009. 458 pages. $35.00 (hardcover).

When journalist Kirstin Downey began to apply her extensive research and interviewing skills to interpreting the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor during the New Deal, Downey could not have imagined how relevant her study would soon become. President Obama and his economic team continue to look back to New Deal programs for clues on how to solve the present financial crisis. What they are also realizing is that many of the programs still in place that are keeping people from complete despair were the products of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What is often overlooked is that the person most responsible for designing and administering these programs was Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a position in any American president’s cabinet. Unemployment insurance, social security for elders and dependent


children, minimum wage, the forty-hour work week with time and a half for overtime, and stringent child labor laws were all developed under the direction of Perkins, who worked closely with Roosevelt.

Perkins had New England roots and projected the image of a Boston Brahmin. Although she was born in Boston, her family’s homestead for many generations was in Newcastle, Maine. Her early schooling was in Worcester where her father moved to start a business. It was her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke that convinced her to lead a life of service.

When Frances Perkins accepted the position in Roosevelt’s administration, she was fifty-two and at the peak of her powers and experience. There was no other person more qualified for the position than she or with better connections. Downey carefully documents how Perkins gained the necessary skills and confidence to develop the federal government programs that were so radical for the times. In doing so, Downey makes clear the important but often overlooked contribution of the women’s progressive reform movement to framing essential national programs, beginning in the settlement houses.

Frances Perkins worked first with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago. Her most important mentor was Florence Kelley, executive secretary of the National Consumers League, who brought new social science methods to reform. After earning a master’s degree in political science at Columbia, Perkins moved to Greenwich Village and became part of a group of activist reformers and writers, making connections she used her whole life. When Kelley hired Perkins as executive secretary of the New York City branch of the National Consumers League, Perkins found her life’s work. The New York league’s goals were specific and required legislation. The league wanted to improve conditions in cellar bakeries, raise women’s wages and lower their hours, and eliminate child labor and workplace fire hazards. In her position, Perkins was poised for the turning point that would take her up the political ladder and allow her to design and carry out important reform programs, first in New York and then for the whole country.

In 1911, when Perkins was having tea with friends at Washington Square Park, whistles and alarms directed them to the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that resulted in the deaths of 146 young women garment workers. Not only did Perkins recognize that it was the moment to enact reforms, but she also knew who could help her meet her goals. She already had success for her programs with politicians in Tammany Hall and the New York legislature, including Al Smith, then the minority leader of the

173BOOK REVIEWS

New York Assembly. These events, coupled with recommendations from Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, led to a surprise offer from former president Theodore Roosevelt. He chose Perkins to become executive director of a new Committee on Safety he organized to end industrial fires. The Committee’s efforts led to the creation of the powerful New York State Factory Investigating Commission in1911, six years before New York women achieved suffrage.

The groundwork was now laid for Frances Perkins’s steady and significant contribution to the agendas of the next two New York governors, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, from 1918 to 1932. After women’s suffrage became an amendment in 1920, both governors were anxious “to please the women,” as they put it. Al Smith appointed Perkins to a well-paid post on the New York Industrial Commission. It handled factory inspection and mediated strikes and workers’ grievances and compensation, and inspected workplaces for safety. When FDR was elected governor, he made Perkins the executive director of the commission, and she became a trusted advisor to Roosevelt. Yet it took a campaign by the Democratic women who got out the vote for Roosevelt’s election and women in the Labor Department to secure Perkins’s selection to the cabinet.

Downey’s well-documented study of the life of Frances Perkins not only emphasizes the importance of the women’s movement in supporting women appointees or candidates — witness the support of women for Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency — but it delineates both the kinds of opposition and problems women in public life can face. Perkins supported a husband and daughter, both suffering with bi-polar disorder. When she faced impeachment over her opposition to the deportation of Harry Bridges, she found little support among the men in the administration.

Downey also presents Perkins’s controversial actions. When Perkins served on the Civil Service Commission under President Harry S.Truman, the Cold War with Russia was on everyone’s minds. Perkins was one of the members who mediated the loyalty oath issue. Downey’s interpretation is that because Perkins had already worked with individuals to either clear their records of Communist Party membership or encouraged them to resign their federal posts, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations were generally false. For that reason the public eventually turned against him. Downey notes that Perkins’s liberal friends did not agree with her actions.

A well researched life of Frances Perkins is long overdue, but Downey’s account was worth waiting for. It is engagingly written and she has mined virtually all available sources. Although her study is about the past, it is full of useful insights for the present.


Polly Welts Kaufman teaches history at the University of Southern Maine. She authored National Parks and the Woman’s Voice: A History andBoston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905.

Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day. By Patricia J. Fanning. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. 255 pages. $32.00 (hardcover).

We are fortunate when writers choose to illuminate corners of history by focusing on fi gures who, however infl uential, were better known in their own times than they are today. For instance, most of us are exposed to the poems of Emily Dickinson, who was virtually unknown when she lived. But today few are familiar with Elizabeth Gaskell, author of nineteenth-century “best sellers.” Books that lead us into such unknown biographical territory can be refreshing and revelatory.

Such a book is Through an Uncommon Lens, Patricia Fanning’s biography of publisher and photographer F. Holland Day (1864–1933). Fanning provides a new perspective on a world previously defi ned by Day’s (currently) more famous contemporaries, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Nonetheless, Day arguably belongs in that pantheon: he has been described as producing “the most ambitious artistic photography of the era.”1

In exploring Day’s life, Fanning also offers a fascinating look at life in Boston, the “Athens of America,” as it underwent commercial and societal transitions at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, Through an Uncommon Lens examines some historic cultural tensions: American artistic vision emerging from its European origins; a photographicartistic vision emerging from painterly and documentary origins; and the divergence between New England and New York artistic milieus. That latter tension is embodied in Day and Stieglitz, who learned from each other, collaborated in a “New School,” and ultimately grew apart. The

1 Keith F. Davis, An American Century of Photography, from Dry-Plat to Digital (Kansas City, Mo.: Hallmark Cards, with Harry N. Abrams, 1995), p. 34.

175BOOK REVIEWS

adage that “nice guys finish last” perhaps applies to Day in relation to Stieglitz. All of Fanning’s evidence indicates that Day was innovative and talented, passionate and flamboyant, but also unassuming, loyal and kind, a generous friend and mentor. He tutored and provided scholarships to disadvantaged youth; among his many notable protégés were celebrity portraitist Bachrach and poet Kahlil Gibran. In contrast, Stieglitz comes across in this book as equally innovative and talented, but a more self-serving and competitive personality.

An aficionado of oysters and Boston baked beans, Fred Holland Day was a true New Englander, the last fruit of a Massachusetts family tree with strong humanitarian and community roots. He was born in South Dedham, Massachusetts, now incorporated as Norwood. He appreciated his regional history, and loved and collected antiques of all kinds. While a lifelong resident of the Bay State, he enjoyed jaunts abroad and retreats to his beloved coastal “chalet” in Maine (where his ashes were scattered after his death). As a boy, he attended Chauncy Hall, a Boston preparatory school. There he was introduced to other expressive and intellectually curious young people who helped shape his ambitions. He went on to co-found an artistic movement (the Visionists), establish and edit two periodicals, and run a Boston publishing house, Copeland and Day, that advocated as much attention to the design and craftsmanship of books as to their content. The company printed popular books for children, as well as work by luminaries Maxfield Parish, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Crane and many others. One Copeland and Day release, Meadow-Grass by Alice Brown, sold 9,000 copies, quite impressive for a female novelist in 1896.

When the company finally dissolved, however, Day was free to turn most of his attention to photography, and he set up a studio in Boston’s Back Bay. At the same time, the altruism evident throughout his life found an outlet in his associations with girls and boys in a settlement house in the North End (so-called then as now), and the Boston Children’s Aid Society: “With his volunteer efforts, like other progressive-minded intellectuals, he sought ways to combat the inequities of urban America, but unlike many reformers who believed that poor and immigrant youths should be taught ‘a trade,’ Day’s encouragement of young people’s education and artistic pursuits knew no boundaries” (69). Through such observations, Fanning’s biography becomes not simply a “portrait of the artist,” but also a study of a place and time. At the same time, Fanning’s book is enriched by her appreciation of the dichotomy in the photographer’s personality: F. Holland Day, the theatrical “artiste” who enjoyed donning the exotic costumes he acquired for his models, was also Fred Day, the patron and


friend whose early encouragement people remembered fondly all their lives.

Supplementing Fanning’s carefully researched and documented, objective yet affectionate, verbal portrait, are dozens of illustrations. The highlights of these are over thirty plates of Day’s photographs, most of which are portraits themselves. They are compelling, whether expressing an Old World mythic, Romantic, or Christian vision, or a distinctly New World, almost Whitmanesque, egalitarianism. His photographs endow his friends, African Americans, immigrant Italians, and the children of Brahmins with dignity and grace, and often with mystery. The format of the book may not provide for the highest quality reproduction, but the images are nonetheless evocative, and Fanning ably integrates her understanding of the works with her understanding of their creator.

Day’s story parallels that told in Suzanne Flynt’s essay “The Allen Sisters: ‘Foremost Women Photographers in America’” which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of HJM. The Allens and Day each produced a significant, transformational body of photographic work. Their photographs borrowed from traditional themes, and yet broke new ground with American settings and subjects. Later, the Allens and Day became overshadowed, perhaps by more assertive peers, perhaps by a more “modern” aesthetic. Through an Uncommon Lens helps restore Day to his rightful place as one of photography’s pioneers and one of Boston’s colorful and formational characters.

Jeanne M. Julian, former communications administrator at Westfield State University, is now living and writing in North Carolina.

Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation: A Heritage of Civic Engagement. By Charles H.W. Foster, editor. Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 2009. 388 pages. $24.95 (hardcover).

The history of land use and particularly open space and water resource protection is an important one and Hank Foster, former Massachusetts commissioner of natural resources, state forester and first secretary of environmental affairs, is the right person to assemble an “A” team of environmentalists, educators and public officials to chronicle how the six New England states first recognized needs, faced crises, benefited from an insightful individual’s largess, followed a charismatic leader or otherwise

177

shaped their environmental holdings, programs and policies.

Despite climatic and geologic similarities, the six states have many differences. Their binding, Foster asserts, draws from an attitude that Harriet Beecher Stowe called “the seedbed of the great American Republic.” There is no particular format to the individual chapters. Unfortunately, perhaps of necessity, they sometimes become laundry lists of legislation or conservation organization action most easily followed and appreciated when one is reading of one’s home state.

Foster himself wrote the Massachusetts chapter and points out that, while the Commonwealth is the 46th in size among the states, it is third in population density. Three-quarters of its land is privately held, two-thirds is forested. Foster provides a brief background of the terrain, from the ancient mountains in the Berkshires to the sandy beaches of Cape Cod, and gives incidents of land abuse a strong context. He identifies individuals of unusual voice and example, from intrepid walker Henry David Thoreau to Theodore Lymann III, first chairman of the New England Fish Commission. Foster points to the success of Mount Greylock Reservation in 1898, cornerstone to “what would ultimately become the eighth largest state forest and park system in the United States” (186).

There have been ambitious private efforts in Massachusetts. Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and Minna B. Hall, concerned about the fate of birds and other wildlife, launched the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1896. The Trustees of Reservations grew from an idea put forth by Charles Eliot, an apprentice landscape architect, to hold open land in trust for the public. And at the federal level, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “forest army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps, opened state forest holdings into campgrounds and recreation areas. Creation of the Quabbin Reservior in 1926 “would become the most significant single-water event of the twentieth century” (189), Foster rightly includes the Berkshire Natural Resources Council based in Pittsfield, but seems to omit the valuable Area of Critical Environmental Concern program, which now covers some 268,000 acres in Massachusetts.

One must ask, however, how these endeavors, accomplishments in the other five states and activities of the federal government, including the establishment of the national parks system and routing of the Appalachian

BOOK REVIEWS


Trail, tie together. Foster suggests that six themes are prominent: self-determination, innovation, sense of place, individual leadership, civic engagement, and high moral and ethical values.

Good history uses the past to tell us about ourselves. This book’s editor believes history endorses a continued strong public role in guiding use of our natural resources: “The concept of unspoiled nature in New England is really a chimera, because there are few places that have not already been touched by humankind. That is another reason why there is general acceptance of the concept of land being actively managed and little support for the thesis that nature left alone is always the best course of action” (365). Until regions such as New England and, of course, the nation can develop uniform and appropriate attitudes and policies toward land use for the future, Massachusetts and other states of necessity will work on their own. This book, along with Foster’s earlier Stepping Back to Look Forward: A History of the Massachusetts Forest (1998), Laura and Guy Waterman’s Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (1989), Gordon Abbott Jr.’s Saving Special Places: A Centennial History of The Trustees of Reservations: Pioneer of the Land Trust Movement (1993) are cornerstones of a must-read library of conservation, recreation and land-protection history.

Bernard A. Drew of Great Barrington is the author of more than thirty books, most of them popular fiction reference works and local Berkshire histories.

Sacco and Vanzetti: Rebel Lives. By John Davis, ed. New York: Ocean Books, 2004. 90 pages. $11.95 (paperback).

John Davis’s Sacco and Vanzetti: Rebel Lives provides a collection of thought-provoking firsthand accounts of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and its aftermath. In the midst of the anti-radical, anti-immigrant and anti-labor first red scare (1919-1920), two anarchist Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of murder based on questionable evidence. During what a number of observers called “the trial of the century,” the two men encountered prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, jingoism, and anti-radical bias. As a result, Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty, sentenced to death and executed.

179

The documents in Sacco and Vanzetti: Reb-el Lives reflect the many important themes in American history that converged during the ordeal. Historians and activists of the past and present have viewed the treatment of Sacco and Vanzetti as a central example of the powers of anti-immigrant, anti-radical and anti-labor senti-ments in early twentieth century America, and, more specifically, of the excesses of post-World War I government-sponsored super-patriotism. Appropriately, the book features primary sources that cover these themes, as well as commentary by activists reflecting on the important legacy of the trial. Each document is well chosen and includes a brief description of its author and/or receptor. Sacco and Vanzetti: Rebel Lives would be a useful and accessible resource for students and scholars interested in the first red scare, jingoism, the labor movement, legal history and the histori-cal memory of radicalism.

Davis’s introduction places the arrests and prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the context of the turbulent immediate post-World War I period. In addition to giving an overview of how the first red scare fueled anti-radical sentiment, Davis mentions the often overlooked postwar recession as an important factor in shaping public opinion against radicals. Davis also encourages readers to consider how the questions facing America during the trial apply to our own time: how to overcome a society divided between the wealthy and the poor; and how to move past a “with us or against us” mentality that that has posited “mainstream” Americans against radicals, and whites against “non-whites.”

The sources compiled by Davis consist of the voices of Sacco and Vanzetti and their numerous supporters. The letters, tracts and other writings in the book particularly emphasize the unity between radicals of different creeds (and even many non-radicals) against the unjust prosecution of the two men. Some rallied behind them simply in the interest of justice. Others rallied for free speech. To many in the labor movement, the case came to symbolize the struggle of the masses against the all too frequent government-abetted capitalist exploitation of the working class.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s own letters from prison give readers insight into their philosophical mindsets under the most trying of circumstances. During their imprisonment, Sacco and Vanzetti continued to develop their bands of anarchism and believed that their struggles against the

BOOK REVIEWS


biases of the American justice system symbolized the righteousness of their anarchist ideology. As such, their letters express both frustration and idealism. Ultimately, Sacco and Vanzetti’s letters suggest that they saw themselves as unjustly dying for their vision of a better world. But they did not feel powerless. As martyrs, Vanzetti proclaimed, “agony is our triumph!” (10)

While Davis includes myriad voices that were sympathetic to Sacco and Vanzetti, the collection could have used the addition of anti-radical sources. After all, it was these voices that made this “miscarriage of justice” possible. The inclusion of a few anti-radical documents, such as the many American newspaper editorials that helped to mobilize public opinion against Sacco and Vanzetti, would give the reader a better sense of what was going through the minds of people who supported the verdict. Nevertheless, the documents selected provide a well organized and mostly comprehensive picture of the trial and its aftermath, and Davis’s introduction offers excellent historical context and raises a number of interesting issues.

Mark W. Robbins is an assistant professor of history at Del Mar College in Corpus Christie, TX.

Sacco and Vanzetti (DVD). By Peter Miller, Director. First Run Features, 2007. 82 minutes. $24.95.

Peter Miller’s documentary, Sacco and Vanzetti, offers a comprehensive, detailed and engaging overview of the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-American anarchists who were convicted of murder in one of the most famous trials of the early twentieth century. The conviction of the two men rested on dubious evidence and the widespread anti-radical and nativist prejudices of the first red scare. The country divided over the outcome of the trial. Italian-American immigrants, laborers, radicals and free speech advocates protested the verdict, while numerous other Americans celebrated the impending executions of the supposedly “un-American” anarchists. For years to come, the case stood as a symbol of

181

many of the divisions in America: those between elites and the working class, immigrants and nativists, and super-patriots and radicals. Sacco and Vanzetti covers all of these themes in elegant detail. It suggests that the case underscored the disjuncture between what America was and what its ideals promised it should be.

Miller uses an effective combination of personal and academic voices to tell the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. The film features the commentary of historians such as Nunzio Pernicone, Howard Zinn, David Felix, David Kaiser and Michael Topp on Sacco and Vanzetti’s background, the trial, and the historical context of early twentieth century America. The historians emphasize the extent to which the trial was as much about the “questionable” patriotism of Sacco and Vanzetti as it was about the actual murders. Recitation of Sacco and Vanzetti’s own words, and commentary from Sacco’s niece, Vanzetti’s neighbor, and the daughter of the paymaster whom Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of murdering, give the documentary a personal flavor. The documentary intersperses these voices with footage of the physical spaces (as they now stand) that were occupied by the two men: their homes in Italy and America, and their workplaces. Taken together, these images, interviews, and historical documents allow the viewer to feel a small but meaningful sense of the powerful emotions that participants and onlookers must have felt throughout the ordeal.

For nearly a century, the case has captivated popular imaginations. As Sacco and Vanzetti aptly demonstrates, artists, musicians, politicians and common citizens have used the case as a rally cry for a more equitable justice system, freedom of ideas, immigrant rights, radicalism, and a stronger labor movement. While exploring these themes, the film displays the art of Ben Shahn and plays the music of Woody and Arlo Guthrie, singing the “Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti.” My only criticism of the documentary is that it frequently uses clips from Giuliano Montaldo’s 1971 film Sacco and Vanzetti to provide re-enactment of parts of Sacco and Vanzetti’s ordeal, but largely does not place it in the context of the otherwise well-presented history of the event in popular memory; because the film is used so frequently, the viewer hopes for an analysis of where it fits in. Nevertheless, Peter Miller’s treatment of the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti is generally thorough and effective.

Miller’s Sacco and Vanzetti would be useful to anyone interested in the history of radical movements, immigration, the labor movement or the first red scare. It also would make an excellent complement to a lecture on any of these topics to a modern U.S. history survey class. It allows students or general viewers to see, through this vivid example, the powerful images of

BOOK REVIEWS


state-sponsored repression, and the challenges that the immigrant working class faced in early-twentieth-century America.

Mark W. Robbins is an assistant professor of history at Del Mar College.

The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. By Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 306 pages. $21.95 paperback.

As diasporas go, the Puerto Rican numbers are relatively small, 3.4 million in the United States in 2000. However, given that the population of Puerto Rico was only 3.8 million in 2000, the impact of this out migration on Puerto Rico has been great. In the U.S., the geographic distribution was originally limited to the old industrial states. Although the diaspora spread to the south and west in the late twentieth century, following the pattern of other Hispanics in seeking opportunity in the Sunbelt, the stories told in this collection are of Puerto Rican communities begun in an earlier era.

Although Puerto Ricans migrated to Hawaii early in the twentieth century, they mainly located to New England and the general northeast, the “rust belt” extending to Chicago. This collection of essays is fairly representative of academic surveys that focus on a particular ethnic group. Structurally the work includes an introductory overview and synopsis of the chapters to follow, histories of Puerto Ricans in various cities, and a final chapter that ties the essays together by highlighting patterns across the essays.

Whether discussing Boston, Chicago, the various cities of Connecticut, a county in New Jersey, or a small city in Ohio, most essays begin in the nineteenth century with the first Puerto Rican merchant or cigar maker or some other respectable individual identified through the census or city directories. The story continues through long years of a small presence, recruitment of a different class, perhaps the agricultural worker, and then the surge to the cities as the Puerto Rican economy becomes unable to

183

support the available workforce. Sometimes there is a secondary migration from the fi elds to the cities or from a larger to a smaller community.

Regardless of how the fi rst Puerto Ricans entered a new setting, the early migrants received a hospitable welcome, but just as commonly the surge created identifi able neighborhoods and provoked negative responses. Prejudice gave way in time to ethnic pride on the model of the African American movement, and Puerto Rican communities created activist organizations, protested, gained federal money and recognition, and moved slowly toward middle class status while creating an identifi able Puerto Rican section of the city (Boston’s Villa Victoria, for example). Eventually Puerto Ricans became a political force, although the fi rst statewide electoral victory of a Puerto Rican candidate in Massachusetts was not until 1988.

Although the numbers are relatively small, tens of thousands in most cities rather than the hundreds of thousands that characterize the comparable surges in the Southwest, a given Puerto Rican community quickly reached the critical mass that tipped them into a status as outsiders, aliens, or “undesirable” competitors for resources, including housing, jobs, and community services. This process is typical, whether the migrant community is southwestern Hispanic, west coast Asian, or eastern and midwestern Irish, German, and Welsh.

The author seeks to correct two misreadings of Puerto Rican American history: the assumptions that Puerto Ricans are recent migrants and that their migration has been to New York City, the post World War II “Newyorican” phenomenon. The book does that successfully in the sense that it identifi es the early individuals who located in the cities under examination and, more notably, in its tracking of the rise of the Puerto Rican communities of the various cities and states (Connecticut’s chapter deals with several cities. Hawaii also lacked a single, dominant urban Puerto Rican setting).

The book also serves as a reminder that Puerto Ricans are a unique group in American politics. They are United States citizens with absolute rights to travel to and from the island, voting rights, and the same status as other citizens.1 At the same time, they identify and are identifi ed as an ethnic group like Mexican Americans or Italian Americans; there is also

1 However, in an ironic twist, Puerto Ricans do not have the right to vote for the U.S. president when they reside in Puerto Rico: according to the U.S. constitution, electoral college members, who are charged with actually electing the president, can only be selected by the states, which Puerto Rico itself is not.

BOOK REVIEWS


a degree of similarity with African Americans in being denied what is rightfully theirs as well as in the racial discrimination that darker-skinned Puerto Ricans often experienced.

The authors mostly focus on traditional overviews of Puerto Ricans in a given city. Although there are nods to the Asians in Hawaii and Hispanics in the cities where Puerto Ricans merged into a broader Hispanic grouping, there are no serious attempts to tie this group to the broader civil rights movements or to compare the early Puerto Rican experience to those of similar minorities. As a result, the book stands alone without the context that could make it an effective introduction to immigrant history. It is, however, a good introduction to the history of Puerto Ricans in the United States.

John Barnhill is a retired civil servant and independent scholar who writes history in Houston, Texas.

When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On And Off The Streets. By Timothy Black. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009. 464 pages. $29.95 (hardcover).

Sociologist Timothy Black’s ethnography of three brothers from Puerto Rico uses their experiences, largely drawn from Springfield, Massachusetts, to argue that government and corporate policies along with insidious racism are the cause of a growing underclass. A professor of sociology, Black acknowledges that by definition ethnography must be vulnerable to the risks of subjectivity. This is the critical problem throughout the work. Given the nearly twenty years he invests in not only chronicling the lives of these youth as they grow into adulthood, but in trying to advocate for them, subjectivity is unavoidable. Black immerses himself in the culture of their world, spending innumerable nights on Springfield’s drug-infested streets. What results is not only a powerful work of social criticism but an engaging challenge to the deeply ingrained image of the Springfield Renaissance

185

of the 1980s. Black is not a historian, yet his work deftly details social, economic, and workforce history.

The reader is taken into a dark world of exploitation, bureaucratic apathy, and racism. The Rivera brothers and extended family are victims of United States colonial policies against Puerto Rico. They are casualties of the de-industrialization of the American economy and its transition from high-waged manufacturing jobs to those that are service-based, featuring minimum wages for those without education. Adequate education is denied them by the racism of segregated, underperforming schools in cities experiencing white flight. Lacking white privilege or an accommodating educational system, facing draconian waves of social service cuts and a difficult recession, all three turn to the only industry available, the illegal drug economy. Violence, crime, gang involvement, incarceration and addiction overtake or at least touch each of them.

Black points the blame at former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. No longer the hero who saved the nation from the “Great Inflation,” Volcker stands accused of serving as a corporate puppet, defending their interests against successful social movements and saturated world markets by sacrificing jobs, unions and the nation’s industrial base in the interest of recovering corporate profitability. Joining Volcker is Ronald Reagan, taking advantage of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society to bring forth de-regulation, tax cuts, and the dismantling of the welfare state established through the New Deal and the programs of the liberal 1960s. These government policies, combined with expansion of the illegal drug industry and the war on drugs, with the resulting growth of the prison industrial complex, Black cites as the cause of the rampant poverty of inner city hubs such as Springfield and Worcester, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut.

The economic overview is an overly subjective polemic. Thought-provoking, if unconvincing, it challenges the prevailing assessments of current economists. The calls for a massive federal urban New Deal program and/or social revolution, however, ring as naïve or archaic. The included historiography of modern urban poverty research is, however, invaluable.

Black also considers the tight labor market of the late 1990s and its impact on Springfield’s streets. The experience of eldest brother Julio provides strong perspective for the ensuing decade. Struggling to join the middle class and prosper in the de-regulated trucking industry, while maintaining a house in Springfield with a variable mortgage rate in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, his experience has an Everyman quality. Black

BOOK REVIEWS


also explores the world of addiction, treatment, recovery and conviction through the experience of middle brother Fausto.

A serious flaw in the work is a failure to consider the lack of personal responsibility on the part of the subjects. Black seeks throughout the book, as he has done for his subjects in the court room, to argue that they are blameless for the choices they make. There is no room in this work for individual accountability. The brothers are simply victims of life accidents, random chance, racism and powerful macroeconomic forces conspiring against them at every turn. It is not Julio’s fault he loses his job after punching a co-worker. Violating rules at a rehabilitation center and being kicked out is not an obvious consequence. Being sent to jail after a crime spree is a side effect of addiction and an unsympathetic court system. Selling and using cocaine at school is explained as a terminal flaw in the school and its curriculum. Joining a gang and shooting rivals are a lack of community and economic opportunity. Getting arrested for selling drugs is rationalized as bad luck and a lack of financing options for purchasing a vehicle. The statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl is a consequence of overcrowding in their substandard housing and her selection of the role of the victim in order to follow an internalized script.

At his worst, Black complains of the racism in the wary glance of a shopkeeper toward his three charges. He overlooks that the merchant’s fears that the three men might be gang members, drug users, or criminals are not a racist bias but an accurate assessment. The three brothers engage in the drug trade. They are members of gangs. Each spends time behind bars. One terrorizes stores in the Greater Springfield area during his drug-induced crime sprees.

The work has strong historical emphasis. Black offers an overview of the history of Puerto Rico under American hegemony, industrialization and its impact on the rural island, as well as gender relationships, identity and the Puerto Rican Diaspora. There is exploration of the anti-colonial Jibaro identity and the introduction of the independence movement into a cultural, linguistic theater. Similarly, he explores the identity of the “Old G” and his role on Springfield’s streets. Springfield’s recent history, its drug trade, culture and gang wars are well documented. Black is at his best capturing the Springfield lying in the shadows of the office towers that were built in the discredited Renaissance.

When meeting in person the man given the pseudonym “Fausto,” the author’s description is proven accurate. Fausto is intelligent, articulate and engaging. It is a national tragedy that Fausto and the rest of “the lost

187

generation” have not achieved their full actualization, not only for them, but for what they could contribute to our world.

Thoroughly researched with liberal use of primary source materials, the book is well-written and easy for a wide demographic to experience. It is invaluable for anyone, especially historians, seeking to understand the recent history and decline of Springfield.

For social workers, drug counselors and students, here is an opportunity to understand the world of gangs, drugs and recidivism. Perhaps the best application of this work is as a starting-off point for a larger national debate on what to do about the problems of drugs, urban core decline, the crisis in education and the challenges of a multicultural society. For this work to truly achieve its potential, that debate should include not only the role of ambiguous, nefarious economic forces, but individual responsibility for personal decisions made.

J. A. Marshall is a workforce development counselor at Futureworks in Springfield, MA, and earned his M.Ed. in history at Westfield State University in 2009.

Springfield (Postcard History Series). By G. Michael Dobbs. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. 127 pages. $19.99 (paperback).

Arcadia Publishing is known for its extensive line of local history photography publications. Springfield is part of the Postcard History Series, which focuses exclusively on old postcards. A brief introductory essay outlines some of the high points of Springfield’s history, from the founding of the settlement by William Pynchon to the present day. Numerous famous residents are also briefly profiled, including Springfield’s most famous son, Theodore Geisel, and one of her most infamous, Timothy Leary.

The bulk of the book consists of 180 postcards. Many of the postcards feature the landmarks of Springfield, such as Forest Park, Court Square and other important municipal buildings. Others focus on important businesses, such as the Smith and

BOOK REVIEWS


Wesson plant, the Springfield Armory and the Indian Motorcycle factory. Like the Images of America series, each postcard is accompanied by a short caption.

The captions, while informative, are too short to add up to anything of substance. There is no attempt at interpretation or placing the postcards into any sort of historical context. While current or former area residents (myself included) will enjoy seeing familiar buildings, some gone, others not, without any kind of contextual support, Springfield is little more than a collection of old postcards. This is particularly unfortunate because some of Springfield’s best history is left out as a result.

An excellent example is the postcard featuring the Bosch Magneto Company. Bosch was a well-known and long-time employer in the city. Opened in 1910, it was in operation until 1986, when the plant’s operations were moved to another state. The building itself, situated along the border of Springfield and Chicopee, was destroyed by arson in 2004. This information, all from the caption, is somewhat interesting, but the reader would be better served by being told the real story behind the Bosch plant. Originally owned and operated by a German family, the factory was seized by the federal government twice, during both the First and Second World Wars. After World War I, the original owners were allowed to repurchase the business, but the government refused to permit this after the second, and ownership passed to a new company that remained in control until the plant’s closure.

This amount of information is difficult, if not impossible, to get into a caption for a postcard. But it isn’t in the book anywhere. The logical place would be the introduction, but upon closer examination, the introduction reads like an extended version of the captions, and repeats a good deal of information that can be found there. The Bosch postcard is not the only example, but it is one of the most striking.

Many questions go unanswered. What are the origins of the postcards themselves? Postcards featuring the beautiful architecture and monuments of the city make sense. Springfield was once a popular tourist destination, one of the gateways to the Berkshires. Postcards to sell to that market would be expected to appear. But who thought a postcard of the Bosch factory would be popular, or Monsanto, a chemical factory? Why was it produced, and by whom? A large number of the postcards appear courtesy of their owners. Why did these individuals keep these postcards? What was their connection or interest to the subjects of them?

Local history buffs will no doubt enjoy Springfield, or any of the other similar books that Arcadia Publishing churns out yearly. As a local

189

history buff, the reviewer found the postcards interesting, especially when one spots a house or building that still exists today. But without that local connection, this book is the equivalent of a neighbor’s vacation slide show. It is pretty and interesting, but it lacks meaning.

Micah Schneider is a master’s candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

BOOK REVIEWS

hjm fall 2010 complete text - westfield state university · eric jay dolin’s leviathan: the...

Documents